This disclosure relates to data structure management.
Security systems enforce enterprise defined policies. These policies can, for example, define rules to ensure regulatory compliance, defense against malware, improved productivity, and optimized use of network bandwidth. The policies also define permitted users and user roles, the latter of which define the access permissions of the permitted users. The policy data can be modified by users having administrative access privileges, i.e., administrators. Often there are multiple administrators, each having particular responsibilities for functional areas, e.g., a human resources administrator, and information technology administrator etc. Policies are refined when better security practices are found, when new employees are hired or existing employees leave or migrate into a different division of the company, or employee roles change.
Policies cover multiple functional areas and may be defined and modified by multiple administrators. Regardless of the number of administrators involved in a modification, correct and intended changes must be captured in the systems. This is commonly achieved in existing systems through the use of database locks. An administrator can acquire a lock on a database until the administrator completes the configuration change, which results in a new compilation of the policy data. All other administrators must wait for the completion of the modification by the first administrator, however. Thus administrators of the same enterprise modifying two distinct functional areas must sequentially modify the configuration. Accordingly, the coordination of work across functional areas becomes difficult.